Journal tags: talking

I haven’t spoken at any conferences so far this year, and I don’t have any upcoming talks. That feels weird. I’m getting kind of antsy to give a talk.

I suspect my next talk will have something to do with HTML web components. If you’re organising an event and that sounds interesting to you, give me a shout.

But even though I’m not giving a conference talk this year, I’m doing a fair bit of hosting. There was the lovely Patterns Day back in March. And this week I’m off to Amsterdam to be one of the hosts of CSS Day. As always, I’m very much looking forward to that event.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time for the biggie. UX London is just two weeks away—squee!

There are still tickets available. If you haven’t got yours yet, I highly recommend getting it before midnight on Friday—that’s when the regular pricing ends. After that, it’ll be last-chance passes only.

When I was hosting the DIBI conference in Edinburgh back in May, I moderated an impromptu panel on AI:

On the whole, it stayed quite grounded and mercifully free of hyperbole. Both speakers were treating the current crop of technologies as tools. Everyone agreed we were on the hype cycle, probably the peak of inflated expectations, looking forward to reaching the plateau of productivity.

Something else that happened at that event was that I met Deborah Dawton from the Design Business Association. She must’ve liked the cut of my jib because she invited me to come and speak at their get-together in Brighton on the topic of “AI, Web3 and design.”

The representative from the DBA who contacted me knew what they were letting themselves in for. They wrote:

I’ve read a few of your posts on the subject and it would be great if you could join us to share your perspectives.

How could I say no?

I’ve published a transcript of the short talk I gave.

Someone was asking recently about advice for public speaking. This was specifically for in-person events now that we’re returning to actual live conferences.

Everyone’s speaking style is different so there’s no universal advice. That said, just about everyone recommends practicing. Practice your talk. Then practice it again and again.

That’s good advice but it’s also quite time-consuming. Something I’ve recommended in the past is to really concentrate on the start and the end of the talk.

You should be able to deliver the first five minutes of your talk in your sleep. If something is going to throw you, it’s likely to happen at the beginning of your talk. Whether it’s a technical hitch or just the weirdness and nerves of standing on stage, you want to be able to cruise through that part of the talk on auto-pilot. After five minutes or so, your nerves will have calmed and any audio or visual oddities should be sorted.

Likewise you want to really nail the last few minutes of your talk. Have a good strong ending that you can deliver convincingly.

Make it very clear when you’re done—usually through a decisive “thank you!”—to let the audience know that they may now burst into rapturous applause. Beware the false ending. “Thank you …and this is my Twitter handle. I always like hearing from people. So. Yeah.” Remember, the audience is on your side and they want to show their appreciation for your talk but you have to let them know without any doubt when the talk is done.

At band practice we sometimes joke “Hey, as long as we all start together and finish together, that’s what matters.” It’s funny because there’s a kernel of truth to it. If you start a song with a great intro and you finish the song with a tight rock’n’roll ending, nobody’s going to remember if somebody flubbed a note halfway through.

So, yes, practice your talk. But really practice the start and the end of your talk.

The Clearleft podcast is currently between seasons, but that’s not going to stop me from yapping on in audio files at any opportunity.

By the way, if you missed any of season two of the Clearleft podcast, be sure to check it out—there’s some good stuff in there.

I’ve been continuing my audio narration of Jay Hoffman’s excellent Web History series over on CSS tricks. We’re eight chapters in already! That’s a good few hours of audio—each chapter is over half an hour long.

The latest chapter was a joy to narrate. It’s all about the history of CSS so I remember many of the events that are mentioned, like when Tantek saved the web by implenting doctype switching (seriously, I honestly believe that if that hadn’t happened, CSS wouldn’t have “won”). Eric is in there. And Molly. And Elika. And Chris. And Dave.

Here’s the audio file if you want to have a listen. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed in your podcast-playing app of choice.

If you’re not completely sick of hearing my voice, you can also listen to the latest episode of the Object Oriented UX podcast with Sophia V. Prater. Our chat starts about eleven minutes into the episode and goes on for a good hour.

It was nice to be on the other side of the microphone, so to speak. The topic was Resilient Web Design but the conversation went in all sorts of directions.

I do enjoy a good natter. If you’ve got a podcast and you fancy having a chat, let me know.

I really, really missed speaking at conferences in 2020. I managed to squeeze in just one meatspace presentation before everything shut down. That was in Nottingham, where myself and Remy reprised our double-bill talk, How We Built The World Wide Web In Five Days.

That was pretty much all the travelling I did in 2020, apart from a joyous jaunt to Galway to celebrate my birthday shortly before the Nottingham trip. It’s kind of hilarious to look at a map of the entirety of my travel in 2020 compared to previous years.

Mind you, one of my goals for 2020 was to reduce my carbon footprint. Mission well and truly accomplished there.

But even when travel was out of the question, conference speaking wasn’t entirely off the table. I gave a brand new talk at An Event Apart Online Together: Front-End Focus in August. It was called Design Principles For The Web and I’ve just published a transcript of the presentation. I’m really pleased with how it turned out and I think it works okay as an article as well as a talk. Have a read and see what you think (or you can listen to the audio if you prefer).

Giving a talk online is …weird. It’s very different from public speaking. The public is theoretically there but you feel like you’re just talking at your computer screen. If anything, it’s more like recording a podcast than giving a talk.

Luckily for me, I like recording podcasts. So I’m going to be doing a new online talk this year. It will be at An Event Apart’s Spring Summit which runs from April 19th to 21st. Tickets are available now.

I have a pretty good idea what I’m going to talk about. Web stuff, obviously, but maybe a big picture overview this time: the past, present, and future of the web.

Time to prepare a conference talk.

At the start of this month I was in Amsterdam for a series of back-to-back events: Indie Web Camp Amsterdam, View Source, and Fronteers. That last one was where Remy and I debuted talk we’d been working on.

The Fronteers folk have been quick off the mark so the video is already available. I’ve also published the text of the talk here:

How We Built The World Wide Web In Five Days

This was a fun talk to put together. The first challenge was figuring out the right format for a two-person talk. It quickly became clear that Remy’s focus would be on the events of the five days we spent at CERN, whereas my focus would be on the history of computing, hypertext, and networks leading up to the creation of the web.

Now, we could’ve just done everything chronologically, but that would mean I’d do the first half of the talk and Remy would do the second half. That didn’t appeal. And it sounded kind of boring. So then we come up with the idea of interweaving the two timelines.

That worked remarkably well. The talk starts with me describing the creation of CERN in the 1950s. Then Remy talks about the first day of the hack week. I then talk about events in the 1960s. Remy talks about the second day at CERN. This continues until we join up about half way through the talk: I’ve arrived at the moment that Tim Berners-Lee first published the proposal for the World Wide Web, and Remy has arrived at the point of having running code.

At this point, the presentation switches gears and turns into a demo. I do not have the fortitude to do a live demo, so this was all down to Remy. He did it flawlessly. I have so much respect for people brave enough to do live demos, and do them well.

But the talk doesn’t finish there. There’s a coda about our return to CERN a month after the initial hack week. This was an opportunity for both of us to close out the talk with our hopes and dreams for the World Wide Web.

I know I’m biased, but I thought the structure of the presentation worked really well: two interweaving timelines culminating in a demo and finishing with the big picture.

There was a forcing function on preparing this presentation: Remy was moving house, and I was already going to be away speaking at some other events. That limited the amount of time we could be in the same place to practice the talk. In the end, I think that might have helped us make the most of that time.

We were both feeling the pressure to tell this story well—it means so much to us. Personally, I found that presenting with Remy made me up my game. Like I said:

It’s been a real treat working with Remy on this. Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s kind of a web hero of mine, so this was a real honour and a privilege for me.

This talk could have easily turned into a boring slideshow of “what we did on our holidays”, but I think we managed to successfully avoid that trap. We’re both proud of this talk and we’d love to give it again some time. If you’d like it at your event, get in touch.

In the meantime, you can read the text, watch the video, or look at the slides (but the slides really don’t make much sense in isolation).

Back in the late 2000s, I used to go to Copenhagen every for an event called Reboot. It was a fun, eclectic mix of talks and discussions, but alas, the last one was over a decade ago.

It was organised by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. I hadn’t seen Thomas in years, but then, earlier this year, our paths crossed when I was back at CERN for the 30th anniversary of the web. He got a real kick out of the browser recreation project I was part of.

I few months ago, I got an email from Thomas about the new event he’s running in Copenhagen called Techfestival. He was wondering if there was some way of making the WorldWideWeb project part of the event. We ended up settling on having a stand—a modern computer running a modern web browser running a recreation of the first ever web browser from almost three decades ago.

So I showed up at Techfestival and found that the computer had been set up in a Shoreditchian shipping container. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do, so I just hung around nearby until someone wandering by would pause and start tentatively approaching the stand.

“Would you like to try the time machine?” I asked. Nobody refused the offer. I explained that they were looking at a recreation of the world’s first web browser, and then showed them how they could enter a URL to see how the oldest web browser would render a modern website.

Lots of people entered facebook.com or google.com, but some people had their own websites, either personal or for their business. They enjoyed seeing how well (or not) their pages held up. They’d take photos of the screen.

People asked lots of questions, which I really enjoyed answering. After a while, I was able to spot the themes that came up frequently. Some people were confusing the origin story of the internet with the origin story of the web, so I was more than happy to go into detail on either or both.

The experience helped me clarify in my own mind what was exciting and interesting about the birth of the web—how much has changed, and how much and stayed the same.

All of this very useful fodder for a conference talk I’m putting together. This will be a joint talk with Remy at the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks. We’re calling the talk How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days:

The World Wide Web turned 30 years old this year. To mark the occasion, a motley group of web nerds gathered at CERN, the birthplace of the web, to build a time machine. The first ever web browser was, confusingly, called WorldWideWeb. What if we could recreate the experience of using it …but within a modern browser! Join (Je)Remy on a journey through time and space and code as they excavate the foundations of Tim Berners-Lee’s gloriously ambitious and hacky hypertext system that went on to conquer the world.

Neither of us is under any illusions about the nature of a joint talk. It’s not half as much work; it’s more like twice the work. We’ve both seen enough uneven joint presentations to know what we want to avoid.

We’ve been honing the material and doing some run-throughs at the Clearleft HQ at 68 Middle Street this week. The talk has a somewhat unusual structure with two converging timelines. I think it’s going to work really well, but I won’t know until we actually deliver the talk in Amsterdam. I’m excited—and a bit nervous—about it.

Whether it’s in a shipping container in Copenhagen or on a stage in Amsterdam, I’m starting to realise just how much I enjoy talking about web history.

Conference talks are like buses. They take a long time and you constantly ask yourself why you chose to get on board.

I’ll start again.

Conference talks are like buses. You wait for ages and then three come along at once. Or at least, three conference videos have come along at once:

1. The video of the talk I gave at State Of The Browser called The Web Is Agreement.
2. The video of the talk I gave at New Adventures called Building.
3. The video of the talk I gave at Frontend United called Going Offline.

That last one is quite practical. It’s very much in the style of the book I wrote on service workers. If you’d like to see this talk, you should come to An Event Apart in Chicago in August.

The other two are …less practical. They’re kind of pretentious really. That’s kinda my style.

The Web Is Agreement was a one-off talk for State Of The Browser. I like how it turned out, and I’d love to give it again if there were a suitable event.

I will be giving my New Adventures talk again in Vancouver next month at the Design & Content conference. You should come along—it looks like it’s going to be a great event.

I’ve added these latest three conference talk videos to my collection. I’m using Notist to document past talks. It’s a great service! I became a paying customer just over a year ago and it was money well spent. I really like how I’ve been able to set up a custom domain:

speaking.adactio.com

While the Interaction 19 event was a bit of a mixed bag overall, there were some standout speakers.

Marty Neumeier was unsurprisingly excellent. I’d seen him speak before, at UX London a few years back, so I knew he’d be good. He has a very reassuring, avuncular manner when he’s speaking. You know the way that there are some people you could just listen to all day? He’s one of those.

Marty’s talk at Interaction 19 was particularly interesting because it was about his new book. Now, why would that be of particular interest? Well, this new book—Scramble—is a business book, but it’s written in the style of a thriller. He wanted it to be like one of those airport books that people read as a guilty pleasure.

One rainy night in December, young CEO David Stone is inexplicably called back to the office. The company’s chairman tells him that the board members have reached the end of their patience. If David can’t produce a viable turnaround plan in five weeks, he’s out of a job. His only hope is to try something new. But what?

I love this idea!

I’ve talked before about borrowing narrative structures from literature and film and applying them to blog posts and conference talks—techniques like flashback, in media res, etc.—so I really like the idea of taking an entire genre and applying it to a technical topic.

The closest I’ve seen is the comic that Scott McCloud wrote for the release of Google Chrome back in 2008. But how about a romantic comedy about service workers? Or a detective novel about CSS grid?

I have a feeling I’ll be thinking about Marty Neumeier’s book next time I’m struggling to put a conference talk together.

In the meantime, if you want to learn from the master storyteller himself, Clearleft are running a two-day Brand Master Workshop with Marty on March 14th and 15th at The Barbican in London. Early bird tickets are on sale until this Thursday, so don’t dilly-dally if you were thinking about nabbing your spot.

Rachel and Drew are starting a new service called Notist. It’s going to be a place where conference speakers can collate their materials. They’ve also got a blog.

The latest blog post, by Rachel, is called Do I need to write a brand new talk every time?

New presenters often feel that they need to write a brand-new talk for each conference they are invited to. Unless your job is giving presentations, or you are being paid very well for each talk you give, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep this up if you do more than a couple of talks per year.

It’s true. When I first started giving talks, I felt really guilty at the thought of “recycling” a talk I had already given. “Those people have paid money to be here—they deserve a brand new talk”, I thought. But then someone pointed out to me, “Y’know, it’s actually really arrogant to think that anyone would’ve seen any previous talk of yours.” Good point.

I explain it to people like a band touring an album. Lots of work goes into the album, and the tour puts those ideas on display. To expect a band to write a brand new album’s worth of music in between Pittsburgh and Chicago is absurd.

— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) October 30, 2017

Giving the same talk more than once also allows me to put in the extra effort into the talk prep. If I’m going through the hair-tearing-out hell of trying to wrestle a talk into shape, I’m inevitably going to ask, “Why am I putting myself through this‽” If the answer to that question is “So you can give this talk just once”, I’d probably give up in frustration. But if I know that I’ll have an opportunity to present it more than once, improving it each time, then that gives me the encouragement to keep going.

I do occasionally give a one-off specially-commissioned talk, but those are the exceptions. My talk on the A element at CSS Day’s HTML Special was one of those. Same with my dConstruct talk back in 2008. I just gave a new talk on indie web building blocks at Mozilla’s View Source event, but I’d quite like to give that one again (if you’re running an event, get in touch if that sounds like something you’d like).

My most recent talk isEvaluating Technology. I first gave it at An Event Apart in San Francisco exactly a year ago. I’ll present it for the final time at An Event Apart in Denver in a few weeks. Then it will be retired; taken out to the woodshed; pivoted to video.

I’m already starting to think about my next talk. The process of writing a talk is something else that Rachel has written about. She’s far more together than me. My process involves lots more procrastination, worry, panic, and pacing. Some of the half-baked ideas will probably leak out as blog posts here. It’s a tortuous process, but in the end, I find the satisfaction of delivering the final talk to be very rewarding.

Here’s the thing, though: until I deliver the talk for the first time in front of an audience—no matter how much I might have practiced it—I have literally no idea if it’s any good. I honestly can’t tell whether what I’ve got is gold dust or dog shit (and during the talk prep, my opinion of it can vacillate within the space of five minutes). And so, even though I’ve been giving talks for many years now, if it’s brand new material, I get very nervous.

That’s one more reason to give the same talk more than once instead of creating a fresh hell each time.

I spoke at the GOTO conference in Berlin this week. It was the final outing of a talk I’ve been giving for about a year now called Resilience.

Looking back over my speaking engagements, I reckon I must have given this talk—in one form or another—about sixteen times. If by some statistical fluke or through skilled avoidance strategies you managed not to see the talk, you can still have it rammed down your throat by reading a transcript of the presentation.

That particular outing is from Beyond Tellerrand earlier this year in Düsseldorf. That’s one of the events that recorded a video of the talk. Here are all the videos of it I could find:

• Coldfront
• Render
• Beyond Tellerrand
• Nordic.js
• View Source
• Smashing Conference

Or, if you prefer, here’s an audio file. And here are the slides but they won’t make much sense by themselves.

Resilience is a mixture of history lesson and design strategy. The history lesson is about the origins of the internet and the World Wide Web. The design strategy is a three-pronged approach:

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make that functionality available using the simplest technology.
3. Enhance!

And if you like that tweet-sized strategy, you can get it on a poster. Oh, and check this out: Belgian student Sébastian Seghers published a school project on the talk.

Now, you might be thinking that the three-headed strategy sounds an awful lot like progressive enhancement, and you’d be right. I think every talk I’ve ever given has been about progressive enhancement to some degree. But with this presentation I set myself a challenge: to talk about progressive enhancement without ever using the phrase “progressive enhancement”. This is something I wrote about last year—if the term “progressive enhancement” is commonly misunderstood by the very people who would benefit from hearing this message, maybe it’s best to not mention that term and talk about the benefits of progressive enhancement instead: robustness, resilience, and technical credit. I think that little semantic experiment was pretty successful.

While the time has definitely come to retire the presentation, I’m pretty pleased with it, and I feel like it got better with time as I adjusted the material. The most common format for the talk was 40 to 45 minutes long, but there was an extended hour-long “director’s cut” that only appeared at An Event Apart. That included an entire subplot about Arthur C. Clarke and the invention of the telegraph (I’m still pretty pleased with the segue I found to weave those particular threads together).

Anyway, with the Resilience talk behind me, my mind is now occupied with the sequel: Evaluating Technology. I recently shared my research material for this one and, as you may have gathered, it takes me a loooong time to put a presentation like this together (which, by the same token, is one of the reasons why I end up giving the same talk multiple times within a year).

This new talk had its debut at An Event Apart in San Francisco two weeks ago. Jeffrey wrote about it and I’m happy to say he liked it. This bodes well—I’m already booked in for An Event Apart Seattle in April. I’ll also be giving an abridged version of this new talk at next year’s Render conference.

But that’s it for my speaking schedule for now. 2016 is all done and dusted, and 2017 is looking wide open. I hope I’ll get some more opportunities to refine and adjust the Evaluating Technology talk at some more events. If you’re a conference organiser and it sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in touch.

In the meantime, it’s time for me to pack away the Resilience talk, and wheel down into the archives, just like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The music swells. The credits roll. The image fades to black.